Creating, measuring and analyzing content is one of the essential steps that ensure audience engagement, but the most important ingredient for an engaging content mix is none other than the words themselves.
In order to invite visitors and keep them hooked, the content has to be informative, engaging and most essentially, interactive. You need to engage your audience with the words, the videos and the imagery to make sure their interactive never falls off your website/blog.

We’ve put together some essential metrics and pointers to help you boost your reader engagement:

Content Clarity
What is clarity? It is the ability of your content to provide a comprehensible and easy-to-understand readability, basically making the text easier to read. It is essential because neuroscience dictates that processing the meaning of words poses a much greater cognitive load on the human brain as opposed to videos and imagery.

Shorter Attention Spans
When generating content, it is essential to understand that modern users have a short attention span, and if you want to hook them, the content must be engaging and powerful with very little confusion for your visitors. You want to avoid friction at all costs.

Powerful Readability
For business communication and general information, the gold standard of readability falls at grade eight, and even lower at times. The trick is to avoid using long sentences, limit your passive voice to 5% or even less, and of course, using a lot of active voice with short sentences to make technical subjects much more interactive and engaging.

People, Process, Tools

People, process, and tools is a modern approach that allows commercial and governmental organizations to engage their readers. The people factor focuses on education and awareness, while the processing element dictates identifying the steps that can be automated and mapping the publication process for improvements. And lastly, tools dictate the use of objective measures to analyze readability through subjective and quantitative measurements.

Training Courses
Several leading organizations send their employees and writers to obtain training courses to improve their ability to write for the web, and these involve cover web pages, informative articles, entertainment writing, product brochures and marketing letters amongst others. These training sessions help companies produce powerful web writers with an increased awareness of readability and SEO statistics.

Clarity Tools
Writers can benefit from the help of lightweight clarity tools by measuring, editing and revising their content, and maintaining a solid readability metric before publishing their work.

Audit Tools
Audit tools allow content teams to review, control and score the content, while allowing editors to maintain powerful quality, along with tracking the readability and engagement garnered by the work of every writer on the team individually. This allows editors to understand the success of each writer.

Improve instead of Obsessing
Instead of obsessing over the poor performance of certain content, always focus on the improvements you can bring about by investing in a technology to innovate the content from the front end, adopting innovative content styles and formats, and of course, tailoring the keywords and phrases to help your audience process them easily.

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About the Author

Hi, I’m Randi Sherman, owner of the Social Calling. While I originally started in social media (hence the name), my key competencies are in the areas of project management, editing, and finding exceptionally talented writers to be part of my team. One of my most notable accomplishments was shared with my trusted writing partner when our content resulted in closing a $50,000 sale for our client.
When I’m not immersed in helping business owners improve their website conversions, I spend time with my family and furry friends.